By Pietro Pazzi Most leadership transitions are described from the outside. But the transition that really matters often happens underneath all of that. It is the inner transition — the moment when the leader begins to realise that the identity which brought them here may not be able to take them further. This is where Jung’s work, especially the world that emerges through The Red Book, becomes surprisingly relevant to modern leadership. Not because leaders need to become Jungian scholars, but because Jung gives us a language for something many senior leaders experience but cannot easily name. A leader may come for help with pressure, confidence, performance, conflict, exhaustion, or a sense of being stuck. But very often, beneath the

By Pieto Pazzi My depth coaching is grounded in the 5DL (Five Dimensions of Leadership, Roger Evans) and 5C (Five Capability clusters). The 5DL works from the inside out — it describes the human developmental capacities that characterise outstanding leadership, revealed through ten years of corporate research. The 5C framework serves as the coaching architecture — five clusters of competencies that give coaches and leaders a shared language for what needs to be developed and how. Together they form a complete system: 5DL identifies where the leader is in their inner development; 5C maps what capacities to cultivate to move forward. In-depth coaching — which goes beyond performance and behaviour into identity, meaning, and being —is unusually powerful precisely because

There is a moment in certain coaching conversations that feels… different. The air shifts. The client stops talking about what is wrong with them. No more stories about difficult parents, toxic bosses, or self-sabotage. Those still matter, of course. But something else comes into view. Something quieter, almost awkward to name. It sounds like this: “I think I might actually be good at this.” And then, almost immediately: “But that feels arrogant.” That is the edge. Not the familiar territory of wounds and coping strategies, but something stranger. Potential. Capacity. A kind of internal brightness that has been carefully dimmed. Roberto Assagioli, the founder of Psychosynthesis, called this the Higher Unconscious. Jungian writers later gave it a more provocative label:

Download the PDF of this article: Burnout: Always On, Quietly Breaking. When High Performers Run Out of Road. My coaching supervisor shared John O’Donohue’s poem (I have added it at the end), and it landed with a quiet thud in my chest. Not long ago, I had a heart attack. The main cause was inherited high cholesterol, but I also know I was pushing too hard for too long, treating pace like a virtue rather than a warning sign. These days, almost everyone I meet talks about being chronically tired, as if exhaustion has become the norm. My clients describe the same pattern: heavier workloads, relentless decision pressure, and a mind that never quite switches off. So I wanted to